Every day brings new horrors

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Day #119: Prom Night (2008)

[From IMDB:] Donna’s senior prom is supposed to be the best night of her life, though a sadistic killer from her past has different plans for her and her friends.

My take:

I don’t often comment on poster art for movies, but in this particular case I think that the distance between the poster for this Prom Night remake and the actual movie is illustrative of where the movie went wrong.

The poster? It’s got a gritty look/feel to it, which actually evokes some sense of terror. The movie, on the other hand? In stark contrast, it’s pretty tame – often verging on sickly sweet.

There are a few things that contribute to this, not least of which is the overly perfect relationship that Donna (Brittany Snow) has with her boyfriend, Bobby (Scott Porter). The two of them are so shockingly bland in their perfection (and their acting) that it makes any of their scenes together hard to deal with. I actually found myself feeling like the relationship between Lisa (Dana Davis) and Ronnie (Collins Pennie) was more genuine and relatable – if not because the acting was great (it wasn’t), at least because there seemed to be something more than giggles and sunshine between them.

Johnathon Schaech, on the other hand, did a pretty decent job of bringing the intensity required for his portrayal of a man consumed by his own fantasies. This is despite the screenwriter’s best attempts to drain any of the life out of his scenes, with their over-reliance on trite jump scares – about 95% of which involved mirrors (because no one’s ever done that before!) – and the kind of dialogue that you’d expect from a Lifetime movie.

In the spirit of wanting to say something nice about this movie that I’ve actually watched quite a few times over the years: it looks great, and even though I can’t for the life of me remember any of the music that played during the movie (despite having just watched it), I really like the opening and closing songs.

Now I think I need to go and have a think about exactly why I’ve watched this movie so many times…